MTH - Premier Operating Freight Cars -  Case Quantities Required - N-6b Caboose - O Scale 3 Rail

Until 1920, the Pennsylvania Railroad was divided into Lines West and Lines East, with Pittsburgh as the dividing point. To a large extent, the two operating regions went their separate ways when it came to equipment design, with cabooses being a case in point. In 1914, as Lines East was starting to build the all-steel N5 cabin cars (the Pennsy's name for a caboose), the frugal Lines West commenced a rebuilding program to convert its wooden, four-wheeled cabin car fleet into eight-wheeled, wood-bodied cabooses with steel underframes. The stimulus for the rebuilding was a 1913 Ohio law that mandated steel underframes on cabooses used in pusher service - after a number of older cabin cars had been smashed to bits by the more powerful pushers that were then coming into service.